Circular Text

[jstrater]

I have a logo with text that flows in a circle.  I've attached a .png file to illustrate a previous draft.  How do I curve the text like this in Scribus?  None of the text flow options I've seen do this, and I don't see a way to curve a text frame.

Thanks,

James

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[Nermander]

You can attach text to a path in Scribus.

http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Text_on_a_Path

[jstrater]

Thanks for the quick response.  I thought it had something to do with beziers, but hadn't seen what I was looking for when scanning those docs.  The "text flow" and "text frame" sections seemed more promising at the time.

--
james

[jstrater]

The basic part of this functions beautifully, I don't even have to convert to a bezier, I can simply insert>shape>circle, insert/text frame, item>attach text to path.

...but when I flip the text vertically to achieve the logo design (see original post), the circle of text changes size.

I've attached an example of what happens when you flip the circle.  In this case it's the original circle converted to a bezier, But the result is the same for the 6 or 7 other ways I've tried to make this work.

Note that the flipped circle fits inside the original circle.  Also note that the height and width numbers stay the same, even though the circle is clearly a different size.  I've noticed that when I change the font size in the original circle, the circle grows towards the outside to accommodate the larger font, but the vertically flipped circle grows towards the inside.

Is there a way to avoid this behavior so that the text simply flips and I can lay one circle on top of the other to achieve the effect of a single circle with two bits of text flowing in opposite directions.

Thanks,

James

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[Nermander]

I didn't look at your example but from what I understand the baseline of the text is aligned to the path.

This means that the upper part of the text will be "outside" the circle and the lower part "inside" the circle.

I think that in most cases people would want the text "centered" on the path, but since the text height depends on the font that might be hard do acheive.

Did you try to adjust the baseline offset of the text? It seems to work (I just did a quick test though). -100% put the text on the outside of the path instead of the inside. (But the text got mirrored when flipping, didn't look into that.)

[jstrater]

Changing the baseline offset seems to work at first, but it's not clean.  -100% is way too much, I used -64%. It's pure trial and error trying to get the circles/text to align, and that makes it sound simpler than it actually is.  Alignment is half the problem, making the circle the same size is the other half.

Is it possible to center the text on the path?  That sounds like it might solve the issue.  It sounds like you are talking about a potential feature, not an existing one.

I have no problem with the direction of the text (the mirroring problem you mention).  I think that is horizontal flipping, which in some "attach to path" circumstances also flips the text vertically.  Or maybe we're misunderstanding each other on that.

I've attached a "working" .sla file.  You can see all the settings there.  The other feature that would be nice is to be able to rotate less than 1 degree.  I ended up using the text scaling width field to center the text (vertical center line) inside the circle.  Obviously it's helpful to use a center basepoint for all the frames and polygons.

Thanks for your insights,

James

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